Posts by Muscleguy

NASA's X-59 plane is aiming for a sonic thump, not a boom

Re: I must admit, beyond basic research I do not fully get the point of the X-59 program

Indeed, I live in Scotland but have family in New Zealand. That you can fly Dubai or Doha to Auckland direct is a boon. It was very frustrating to touch down in Brisbane on the way. Auckland is just across the ditch and here we were on the ground for 90min. Add on landing, takeoff and taxiing.

Extend that benefit in range further and further is a better investment than supersonic.

The exception might be the supersonic space plane being developed in New Zealand. You go ballistic travelling in a much less dense less resistant medium. Safety and radiation exposure need to be worked out. But that would be a thing for aircrew. I don’t go back very often so it would not be much of a concern any more than it is on conventional flights.

Singapore to increase road capacity by tracking all vehicles with GPS

Re: fallacy of the rise of the east.....

GPS interference is real. Russia is doing it in the Baltic causing problems for the Finns and Balts. A black hat could make it look like cars are driving in the Straits. What happens if the link to the GPS satellite breaks down? or if war breaks down and only the US is allowed the accurate sort of GPS?

I’m a runner, I have trialled a GPS run tracker on my phone. There are high retaining walls and I run under things. When it loses the signal it draws a straight line from the last position to the new one. So on a corner approaching home it has me running through a house.

I use a Polar footpod to measure pace and distance instead. It notes every footfall. I know where I’ve been and I’m not into posting it on social media.

That position you just applied for might be a 'ghost job' that'll never be filled

Not news

My wife was the victim of this way back in the Noughties. A local university posted jobs which were right down her line. Very unusually detailed but she hit them all. She never even got an interview. The uni was/is notorious for this. Advertising to fulfil the legal requirements but they have an internal candidate they have promised the post to. If they had interviewed my wife they would have had to give her the job.

The job I currently have was vacant for two years while they advertised it internally. I spotted it the moment they went outside, I subscribed to the right job listing email. They latched onto me and practically begged me to take the job.

US Army should ditch tanks for AI drones, says Eric Schmidt

Giddy up!

Meatsack horses may be out of the battlefield but they are being reintroduced in the form of robot ones. Ukraine are trialling them as ways to deliver supplies to front line troops and as a med-evac carrier.

Giving casualties to this as med-evac changes warfare. The general calculation is that wounding one soldier takes three out as they care for and transport the casualty. If the care is temporary and then the caring troops remain on site and ready the advantage of wounding is removed.

Considering UKR is fighting a more numerous enemy this could be key for them.

Re: Yoda says

You can’t hold ground with tanks either. You need boots on the ground for that.

Tanks can take ground but holding requires other assets and informing your artillery that that ground is yours.

Yes, your network is down – you annoyed us so much we crashed it

Re: Finance dept. are at the root of this issue

It’s when my phone suggests grocer’s apostrophe words which make no linguistic sense I begin to worry. When the correct plural is not offered I really begin to worry. This looks like an AI issue. It has learned that some people use grocer’s apostrophes instead of correct plurals and does not know they are wrong.

Re: Finance dept. are at the root of this issue

It’s the load bearing sense of bear you are using there. Bear with me literally means help me carry this.

Tesla's big reveal: Steering-wheel-free Robotaxi will charge wirelessly

Re: Snakeoil

In New Zealand since just about forever you drive up, punch in how much fuel you want (or fill) place nozzle then lock it on leaving you free to for eg use the free screenwash on the car. It automatically stops like a fill does. It doesn’t have to involve paying at the pump either. Petrol stations here make a mint from the few pennnies over we usually manage so have a disincentive to install it in UK. It was old when we left NZ in ’93, still working last I was back. Nobody dears buck the trend.

Also you don’t have to breathe benzene fumes standing over it while you fill. You can set it to fill then wander into the kiosk knowing how long it will take.

Re: Snakeoil

Indeed, I have a patent water still at work (No you can’t circumvent it). After running for 7 hours the plug when I pull it out is WARM. Its an immersion heating coil (one reason why no conversion, baked ingredients). Has to be switched off, water running 30min before the end to let the coil cool down and avoid tripping the thermal overloads.

The overloads got tested once, while at lunch the tubing on the tap came off so the water drained. They operated and cut the power. Can be reset when cool by simply pressing them back in.

Re: Snakeoil

Depends if the buses go where you want to go, especially without having to take 3 of them. Around here in the evenings you’re closer to a half hour wait.

Re: Snakeoil

Your hallway is a larger receptacle for post when you are away or in hospital than a locker will. Also it will make the lockers a target for thieves. It also doesn’t work for rural areas or for those with mobility problems.

Re: Snakeoil

Doesn’t look like it will take wheelchair users either. In tech developer world nobody is ever disabled.

Smart TVs are spying on everyone

Opt Out Completely

I replaced the TV with a fish tank which sits on the TV stand now. I boxed up the large one I bought my wife so she could game properly and put it in her car when we parted. Our kids have grown and flown no sign of grandkids.

I did not replace it largely for Scottish Political reasons. I decline to be taxed so the BBC can lie to the nation(s).

I recently reconfirmed to the licensing that I do not require a license. Their system cunningly swaps the last two questions to try and catch you out. So beware.

I honestly do not miss it. I tried Netflix on this laptop but wasn’t very impressed and got bored. That happened twice. There are so many books to read and the net. Twitter is the thief of time too.

I have no intention of going back.

After we fix that, how about we also accidentally break something important?

One reads between the lines and realises they’re at Faslane. Civilisation is outside Faslane.

A working Turing Machine hits Lego Ideas

Re: Tape is unbounded, not "infinite"

Much simpler to go to the Restaurant then down to the parking garage and ask Marvin.

HAVE YOU BEEN GOOD?

Watch your mirrors: Tesla Cybertrucks have 'Full' 'Self Driving' now

Re: "sudden, dramatic and dangerous"

NZ houses are designed NOT to fall down on your head in earthquakes. Nobody has died in a domestic house due to that (in the big Kaikoura Quake one elderly gent died of a heart attack as their Christchurch Quake damaged old farmhouse fell down around them but not on them.

The killer is that the house may get red stickered afterwards meaning you can’t live in it. Whole areas in ChCh were red zoned and have become parkland. That was the effect of liquifaction. Bad place to build.

Our first bought house in Dunedin down in the South was on the former salt marsh which became market gardens which became enforced low rise suburbia. When it rained & it was high tide pools of water would form in the garden. We were separated from 2miles of golden sand Pacific surf beach by high wide compacted sand dunes. Roads on part, a heritage rail on the rest. Playing fields. We lay in bed at night being lulled to sleep by the surf.

Re: Your mileage may vary

There was a controversial study comparing driving accident stats in Catholic vs Protestant parts of Europe. You can do that wrt German States. Turns out Catholic countries have significantly higher rates. It was put down to the fact that Catholics get their sins cancelled in confession and penance. This fosters a devil may care attitude.

Protestants don’t get that and some sects even say only a sinless elect can ascend to heaven. Creates more respect for the law and rules generally.

Re: Your mileage may vary

Young person asked me recently why I wouldn’t want a sports car. I did not reply that putting a large sea kayak on one would be tricky. I pointed out they don’t do road humps. It is not possible to get to my place of work without crossing a road hump. Traffic calming, 20mph Secondary, Primary & Nursery.

Re: Your mileage may vary

It’s a matter of density. A spawn used to work at Highland Hotels on the shore of Loch Awe. The turnoff of the road to Oban was single track and the turnofffs to each Hotel ditto. American midwest tourist gets off plane uses Google Maps to guide a rental car. Beyond Crianlarich if they get that far things get interesting.

The two lane road along the north side of Loch Tay becomes intermittently narrowed by bridges over burns. Timing the approach to those wrt oncoming cars is an art. I wouldn’t trust an AI to notice the bridge and plow into it. They don’t have railings.

A look under the hood of the 3D-printed, Raspberry Pi powered 'suicide pod'

NO! A plastic bag you have an asphyxia situation as the CO2 builds and the O2 falls. You die gasping for breath or more likely you desperately claw the bag open.

Re: Serious question

Nitrous made my wife nauseous during childbirth. You don’t want to be barfing during it.

Re: Canada

When I did science research on animals there were levels of suffering any given experiment was allowed to do (with local or total anaesthesia & analgesics). I have been in the position of having to decide that this mouse needs to be killed to end its suffering. If I do not do this I will be prosecuted for animal cruelty and a breach of the Home Office Animal License conditions.

I am good at stretching mouse necks. I made myself good at it so the mouse would not suffer. They are used to being scruffed, so you put them on a surface go to scruff but stretch suddenly and quickly. Mice die easily from shock.

Re: Not a hard thing to do

I make O2, CO2 & H2 chemically and collect them in test tubes by water displacement in my job as a school science tech. I’m sure there’s a way to make N2, get Nitric acid to decompose.

Do you know what a close container of LN2 is called? A bomb.

When carrying a dewar of it back from the big store of it. The clips were down. As soon as we got back to the lab the clips came off. They did not go back on until the dewar was empty.

Re: "why not use your car as the suicide pod"

People have been known to blow their own brains out rather than endure the pain of a stonefish sting.

Choose your nasty Aussie animal extinction CAREFULLY.

Re: sounds complicated

You missed the CO2 scrubber. Our urge to breathe is based on blood pH. If the CO2 rises so will your respiration, right up to gasping in panic.

I’m not kidding, My degree & PhD are in Physiology. In 2nd year respiratory lab I was rebreathing high O2 to induce hypercapnia, My partner kept asking if I was okay and I would grunt. He turned me to room air when I started making “seal noises”. My memory is hazy of the incident. My CO2 level in the device was higher than I achieved on the asphyxia (rebreathing the same normal air). We also did hypozia run by a medically qualified lecturer. The O2 level dropped gradually expressed as metres above sea level. You were given sums to do, when you started getting them wrong or just pausing you got turned onto room air.

After my hypercapnia incident It was changed to something definite like a thumbs up. We were on stools so at some point I would have fallen off.

Bending the rules with flexible non-silicon 32-bit RISC-V chip

But what happens when you dunk it in a really, really hot cup of tea?

Heart of glass: Human genome stored for 'eternity' in 5D memory crystal

Re: DNA, procreate, viruses

Animals, fungi and plants are made of cells which are a combination of archea and a bacteria. Plants then added blue green bacteria as internal symbionts.

The first one may well have been stimulated by the blue green bacteria pumping toxic oxygen into the atmosphere without a by your leave to the anaerobes. All the oxygen chemistry is still done inside the mitochondria, the cytoplasm is largely anoxic still. The mitochondria make oxygen survivable.

Re: Monsters

Look up the RNA World Hypothesis, RNA can be both info store & enzyme. It likely came first, the things which break down naked RNA in this world did not exist back then. Experiments which removed all the proteins and the later added RNAs from the ribosome made a ribosome which self assembles and makes protein. It’s slow and buggy but it works and life probably wasn’t that fast back then and buggy can be a feature in exploring morphospace.

So the sequences of those RNAs along with the RNA Pol III mRNAs should suffice.

Disney kicks Slack to the curb, looks to Microsoft Teams for a happily ever after

Speak it brother. Excel is a spreadsheet, nothing more. It is NOT a database and should NEVER be used as one. I have built Access (Spit!) databases specifically to avoid using Excel. I have designed and built relational databases which work well, generate official reports, print barcodes linked to the data that the benchtop robot could use etc etc.

The thought of trying to do all that in Excel makes me break out in a cold sweat.

Another one is people who don’t know how to anchor the top row so you always have the column names. When the top is miles of scrolling that is unforgiveable.

That’s me, a Mac native suddenly in a job with a Windows box and Teams and Glow (which is going to hell). Recently my line manager retired. The Technicians Team had a vast number of files loaded, MSDS worked up, Risk Analyses etc so we don’t have to reinvent the wheel every year of new students. I noticed in the summer that it was missing from my Teams. I raised a ticket with IT and damn glad I did the Team was in danger of being nuked as it had no owners. They made me an owner and I made my new line manager one so there are two of us.

Nobody else noticed a damn thing of course. Retiring manager didn’t think about the fact he was the only owner of it.

Surely in that situation the software should poll all the Team members about the situation? Then something could be organised. Instead it was headed for the delete shute.

Tor insists its network is safe after German cops convict CSAM dark-web admin

Re: TOR offers no protection against old-fashioned sleuthing methods

Considering we are now using AI to listen and talk to the animals this is the right approach. In the latest results from that it has been learned that marmosets, tiny gregarious primates, have names for each other. They can be added to dolphins and elephants in that category.

FTC urged to stop tech makers downgrading devices after you've bought them

This is why I buy my own music to listen to. I have spent over a decade building and curating and adding to my iTunes library. I have turned a lot of the proprietary files into standard file formats. Files are stored in ordinary Mac folders.

I can listen whenever I want to whether I have a net connection or not. In tunnels, in the air, inside a Faraday cage*, Why would I junk all that and pay monthly for Apple Music? I have more than 49hrs of music in there now. I have very wide and eclectic musical tastes starting with Medieval madrigals and including most of Yousu N’Dour’s work.

*My degrees are in Physiology, we had room sized shielded rooms for doing intracellular recordings during my PhD. A very thin glass electrode with an ionic solution and a wire in it becomes a very good aerial so you have to shield to do recordings.

What do Uber drivers make of Waymo? 'We are cooked'

Re: Waymo business model

If you jack it then throw a net over or flash the cameras AND have the covered truck to run it into you avoid the problem. Though the truck will need a Faraday cage to stop the car reporting it’s whereabouts. So will your workshop. Not a cheap gig to run.

Re: Waymo business model

In the short term. If the business model doesn’t start making a profit at some point in the future that funding will dry up.

Re: Waymo business model

My garage mechanic told me there’s a Skoda car being driven 24/7 except for regular maintenance here. Different drivers obviously. Standard taxi model. Not sure Uber have come to Dundee Scotland yet. I don’t take taxis. I cycle as much as possible, drive when not and occasionally take buses.

I have sprinted for a bus with a full backpack and a large hessian bag full of groceries in each hand. I got a funny look from a guy when I got on it. I was as fast as the bus as it was approaching the stop. It’s just a matter of knowing how to get your legs under you working properly.

I’m old enough to remember trolley buses running on electrickery from overhead wires. They had long wooden poles on the sides for putting the trolley back onto the wire. They went up steep hills which are not in short supply in that city making trams not an option except on limited routes.

NASA confirms who is flying and who is not on SpaceX Crew Dragon

Ouch!

Or maybe ET is also stuck in orbit and was trying to phone home.

A nice cup of tea rewired the datacenter and got things working again

Re: There is a proper way to do most things

Russian Caravan tea* no milk, no sugar but lemon is my idea of tea heaven.

*Long leaf black tea which has been slighly lapsanged.

Re: There is a proper way to do most things

I have a white porcelain tea mug with A Brew Will See You Through on it. Put a brew in it and you can see it through the mug.

AI stole my job and my work, and the boss didn't know – or care

Research should be reliable though. AI is not reliable, it confabulates facts and events then invents fake references to back them up.

It knows facts should be referenced but not that inventing references is wrong and if you can’t find a suitable reference you have label your fact as a hypothesis or hope or some such.

The recent attempt to get an AI to do actual original research also ran into the confabulation program as well the AI rewriting it’s own code when it couldn’t hit deadlines.

No problem just give the AI author a slew of human names for bylines.

Scarlett Johansson sics lawyers on AI biz that cloned her for an ad

Re: Weird Science

In the privacy of their own bedrooms (Eeww!) fine. As soon as they post it so others can use it then that crosses a line. If you charge for it then it crosses another line.

Um facial recognition would work it. You take Scarlet’s face break it down into FR data then do the same with the AI, if they match you have cloned her image mathematically solid. When you go through an E-gate at the airport the system reads your photo or the encoded data then matches it to you.

The FR on my phone doesn’t work if I wear my glasses which have circular correction now so will distort my eyes. Ditto if I try an eGate without taking my glasses off as my PP photo is sans glass.

Re: The Beatles – or what remains of the band

As a child of the ‘60s I have never much liked the Beatles. I was more into Prog Rock. Pink Floyd, Soft Machine etc.

Of late I have gotten into Dusty Springfield and Harry Belafonte.

Trump threatens to send Meta's Mark ‘Zuckerbucks’ to prison if reelected president

UnDeadly to Whales or Wales

There’s an array of tidal turbines in the Pentland Firth generating electrickery. An environmental study showed that cetaceans avoided the area during construction but have returned able to avoid the turbines just fine. If they can avoid turbines in the water they can avoid the static footings of wind turbines with the blades way up in the fricking air.

Trump is an absolute idiot listening to absolute idiots.

Mind you Biden is clearly in the first throes of dementia.

What a Hobson’s choice for Americans.

EV world in serious trouble if China cuts off rare earth materials

All railway engines have electric traction engines. They are wrapped around the wheel shafts. So direct drive. You need a lot of torque to start to move a long goods train but it happens. Trains also sometimes have to go up grades. All the diesel units are diesel electric. The diesel engines are in generator mode running at high revs.

Car makers seem reluctant to wrap the motors around the axels.

An arc welder in the datacenter: What could possibly go wrong?

Re: Blame-shifting gone mad

Unknown powder lab contents reminds me of the time I went in on a Saturday morning and found the door had been jemmied and the big bottle of ether nicked. The cops found the culprits passed out on the ether in the next building (connected by a bridge).

When the boss came back from his sabbatical he was told about it, he then exclaimed “the cocaine!” and rushed off to check the plastic Petri dish which had been sitting on the electrical trunking behind the microscope, unlabelled. The get off your head kiddies had walked right passed it to get the ether.

So there can be advantages to not labelling ALL the white powders.

The cocaine was there because the boss had bought it from Sigma as you could do back then. He used tiny amounts in experiments trying to work out how it acted as a local anaesthetic. The rest of the 10g or so of lab pure cocaine just sat in the dish.